Nick Hoult is the deputy cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.

World Twenty20 changing perceptions

The World Twenty20 has already produced enough thrills to fill an entire 50 over tournament and even the most ardent Test cricket fan would have found it impossible not to have been entertained by Chris Gayle and Kevin Pietersen over the weekend.

Twenty20's ability to boil down cricket's intrinsic skills has been showed on the grandest stage by the game's greatest players for the first time in this country.

Batsmen have hit so many sixes that architects are expected at the Oval next week to find ways of expanding the ground to protect local residents. No longer can quick bowlers be seen as the game's underlings, the unthinking workhorses with the job of doing whatever the skipper tells them to do.

It's not enough to be quick and stick on a length. That gets you marmalised. Changing pace (we have seen around five different slower balls), bowling wide of the crease and doing anything, including a run up like a downhill skier, to put off the batsmen are all tactics on show.

Surely we are not far away from a match when the captain makes a bowling change after every over while the fielding would be unrecognisable to the greats of past.

The public have lapped it up. At the two matches I have covered, both England games, the atmosphere has been more sub-continental style than staid old county cricket.

Perhaps for the first time cricket in this country is reaching a new audience. Young faces were at the Oval and some of them were second or even third generation British Asians. Overtly they were there to support Pakistan and did so noisily. Brilliantly so.

But underneath they were really at The Oval to celebrate cricket, swapping allegiance with every six and 90mph yorker.

It is galvanising this audience, a group first spotted by the IPL, that is the real challenge for the England & Wales Cricket Board.

The market research from this tournament should shape any future Twenty20 policy and change misguided notions that watching Leicestershire and Gloucestershire with only one overseas player in each side is what people want to see. They want the best playing against the best.

Proof of that has been provided by a tournament that has so far really only produced one close match, the Dutch defeat of England.

Twenty20 has been criticised by the non-believers for its failure to provide the last ball dramas that differentiate one-day cricket from Tests. But that is missing the point. West Indies cantered to victory over the Australians but those in the ground witnessing Gayle and Andre Fletcher's total destruction of Brett Lee didn't give a hoot that the match was over as a contest within ten overs of the second innings. That's the power of hitting sixes onto the pavilion roof.